Making Movies

Two men, a Finn and a Belarusian live alone, on a lake's island.

Turo is stuck in a small village and the best thing in his life is being the lead vocalist for the amateur metal band Impaled Rektum. He and his bandmates have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. The guys get a surprise visitor from Norway -- the promoter for a huge heavy metal music festival -- and decide it's now or never. They steal a van, a corpse, and even a new drummer to make their dreams a reality.

Fleeing from the Russian secret police, a young Estonian fencer is forced to return to his homeland, where he becomes a physical education teacher at a local school. The past however catches up and puts him in front of a difficult choice.

A refugee family in Sweden faces trauma after their youngest daughter falls into an unexplained coma when denied asylum. Parents struggle to find a cure, resilience tested amid difficult circumstances.

An Indonesian man with a communist background named Ramli was brutally murdered when the "Communist" purge occurred in 1965. His remaining family members lived in fear and silence until the making of this documentary. Adi, a brother of his, decided to revisit the horrific incident and visited the men who were responsible for the killings and one survivor of the purge. These meetings uncovered sadistic details of the murders and exposed raw emotions and reactions of the killers' family members about what happened in the past - much to Adi's disappointment.

The thorny relationship between a woman and her retired father worsens after he becomes romantically involved with the housekeeper she hires for him.

Olavi, an aged and shabby art dealer, is planning to retire. Accidentally he finds an old painting that he suspects being much more valuable than his colleagues have priced it. He decides to try to prove for the last time for himself, his colleagues and his estranged family that he can make it.

A retiring policeman gets caught up in between two younger men trying to kill each other. A modern borderline western taking place on both sides of the northern Finnish-Swedish border.

The world's hardest - and weirdest - heavy metal band Impaled Rektum is serving their sentence in Norway's nicest prison. They receive word that guitarist Lotvonen's parents' reindeer herding farm is about to come under the hammer. It will take a big gig and big money to save the farm. A breakout ensues and a trip to the world's biggest heavy festival, Wacken in northern Germany begins. The higher the target, the bigger the obstacles. This is what the boys will experience on their epic journey to the main stage of Wacken - every metalhead's heaven.

Saara is a middle-aged doctor who one day finds out that her architect-husband Leo is having an affair with a younger woman, Tuuli. Instead of revealing her true identity, Saara pretends to be someone else and makes friends with Tuuli. At the same time she is planning the best way to revenge her husband and his lover.

Innocence tells the story of children who resisted to be enlisted but capitulated. Their stories were never told as they died during their service. Through a narration based on their haunting diaries, the film depicts their inner turmoil. It interweaves first-hand military images, key moments from childhood until enlistment and home videos of the deceased soldiers whose stories are silenced and seen as a national threat.

Most of us think of death as something clear-cut, and that medical science has it neatly figured out. This feature documentary explodes such assumptions through its exploration of a phenomenon that blurs life and death to an unprecedented degree. In what Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, advanced meditators die in a consciously controlled manner. Though dead according to our biomedical standards, they often stay sitting upright in meditation; remarkably, their bodies remain fresh and lifelike, without signs of decay for days, sometimes weeks after clinical death. Following ground-breaking scientific research into tukdam and taking us into intimate death stories of Tibetan meditators, the film juxtaposes scientific and Tibetan perspectives as it tries to unravel the mystery of tukdam.

In the 1860’s Alaska and Finland are simultaneously parts of the Russian Empire. A Finnish mining engineer Simon buys a Tlingit girl named Tsamo and decides to bring her to Finland. The child, Tsamo, is baptized and Simon starts to teach her European manners. Tsamo thinks she’s married to Simon and acts accordingly, but when Simon marries a lady of his own age and class, she gets confused. Simon is forced to send the girl away and the battle over Tsamo’s identity takes complicated turns.

18 year old Juri is seriously addicted to online gaming, so much so he becomes isolated from his single mother and pushes his girlfriend to the brink of leaving him. He decides to quit, but is soon lured back by one of his net-mates, Niki, who - when they meet for the first time - turns out to look strikingly like Juri. Niki has a web-address tattooed on his arm and when Juri types it into his computer, he gets drawn into a curious game that grants him the username RAT KING. As the game becomes increasingly dangerous, Niki vows to help Juri get through it. But the game triggers a series of life-threatening events and pretty soon Juri realizes that he is gaming for his life.

The Code is a Finnish-made documentary about Linux, featuring some of the most influential people of the free software movement.

Maria's ex-boyfriend Kristian is homeless and moves back in with Maria. Maria works as a nurse at the home of Eeva, a paralyzed writer.

Thirty-year-old twins Jenna and Joni find out that their father has a third child. Sister Jóna lives in Iceland. The siblings' meeting will change everyone's world, relationships and future. As each searches for meaning in their own lives, surging between one father, two homelands and three adult siblings, from reunification to separation and back again. Over the years, the siblings encounter themselves and each other, their similarities and differences.

Marja tries to make ends meet by taking night shifts in a newspaper delivery service, apparently mostly carried out by foreigners. During the day, she sleeps and strives to raise her little daughter as best as she can. As a single parent and lacking a solid income, life is a constant struggle. Things are about to go from bad to worse when she meets her ex-boyfriend whose obsessive demeanour about whether he is the father of Marja´s child will drive her to the edge of sanity.

Little Wing tells the story of 12-year-old Varpu, who's quickly growing to adulthood, and about her mother, who doesn't want to grow up. Varpu lives with her mother and has never met her father. One night Varpu has enough of her riding buddies and her mother. She steals a car and drives up north in search of her father, of whom she only knows the name. But her father is not exactly what she had expected. Meeting him trigger something in Varpu and mother's life, making them realize their role in each other's lives, and in the world.

A specialist nurse is given responsibility for a baby boy with a serious heart condition in the middle of nurses’ strike. She is left balancing between her own family, the baby boy and her loyalty for nurses’ cause.